Having just read Lynch's Catching Big Fish, two quotes stood out to me:
"There's safety in thinking in a diner. You can have your coffee or your milk shake, and you can go off into strange dark areas, and always come back to the safety of the diner. "
"The light can make all the difference in a film, even in a character. I love seeing people come out of darkness."
Maggie Smith's character in both Abbey and HP brooked no BS. We're reaching the time now when more of the Harry Potter teachers are leaving this world, I am not looking forward to the students.
"Poker is a combination of luck and skill. People think mastering the skill is hard, but they're wrong. The trick to poker is mastering the luck. That's philosophy. Understanding luck is philosophy, and there are some people who aren't ever gonna fade it. That's what sets poker apart. And that's what keeps everyone coming back for more." -- Shut Up & Deal
I feel there are multiple notions of "luck" in common use and the ambiguous term leads to misunderstandings.
In my mind, the purest form of luck is, by definition, not something that can be mastered. It is 100% beyond one's control to influence. Examples might include: your genetics, flipping a fair coin, etc.
But lots of people talk about "luck" as though it's something that somehow one take advantage of in a willful way. They say "make your own luck." Or perhaps "put yourself in situations where you're more likely get lucky." Or maybe "master luck"?
That's all fine, and is a worthwhile topic, but I would call that "skill". Maximizing one's odds of something (even something involving luck) is a skill.
Perhaps by "mastering luck" they mean not allowing it to psych you out — even if you're on a long losing streak, even while doing everything right. But again, I'd say saying level-headed is a straightforward skill (difficult though it may be).
Anyway, that's my little rant on the ambiguity of the term "luck" (:
the quote GP is considering "mastering luck" as understanding emotionally that sometimes you will lose. the quote asserts that handling your emotions is more difficult than the skill of the game.
so i think there is a chance that the quoted person would agree with your comment here, as I think it is orthogonal to the quote
Luck follows (or at least positively correlates) with skill :) 30+ years ago in our company of friends in the university dormitories we had a guy who had the card deck handling skills of a major illusionist (and those skills were naturally a source of significant income for him). The guy was also tremendously lucky - well beside mere being alive and without broken bones while applying his skills for income :) - in particular once he won an amount enough to buy 1-bdrm apt in St.Petersburg back then on a scratch lottery ticket that he bought at a random place on our way while we were walking to some business meeting in a city that we just arrived that morning. If it were a skillful illusion, then it was way beyond anything i've heard or seen before :)
I used to be the absolute BEST at scratch lottery tickets. OTOH, "every ticket a winner" used to be a thing, and I had free access to an MRI machine at the time.
Lotteries are for losers, but scratch tickets are interesting crypto problems. Winning tickets are printed algorithmically and (at least around here) serial numbered. Given past winning ticket numbers (available via FOIA request, ask me how I know...) it's possible to determine winning serial numbers in the future. (At least in states that don't rotate their pseudorandom seeds, and some...don't.)
Finding the winning tickets out in the world such that you can get away with buying just them is a harder problem, as they're normally sold 'in order', and going around THAT is the thing that gets your winning ticket DQ'd.
There's always something nice about "free money", and it's achievable here, but an honest job is less work.
From personal experience, the main Quora experience is their Digest e-mails; less than a third are relevant topics.
And there are now constant "Edit:" updates on answers addressing the trolls and hateful responses, further dampening my interest in answering questions.
You bring up good points against the physical medium (especially when it comes to note-taking), but I'd respectfully disagree.
Books I've read multiple times, the great ones, nothing beats a well-made physical edition.
The way light pushes off the pages, that smell...the book changes over time as you read it more. It almost takes on a life of its own with yours.
And, if you need to be completely offline or Amazon decides to one day Google-drop your entire online library, that book will still be open to you.
Great work deserves to be supported. Buying a physical copy is my small way to show my support.
Not only that, a much read book is like an old friend when you pick it up again. The wrinkled edges, the spine giving away with ease when turning, the small tea spill stain you made on accident.
When Ridley Scott's Napoleon came out, I picked up Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts. Turns out Napoleon kept a copy of Ossian on him at all times during his war campaigns. Going deeper into the rabbit hole, I bought a copy of Ossian.
My pet theory is that he cribbed a lot of inspiration from Ossian for his famous harangues to his army before pivotal moments in battle.
"Farewell, thou bravest of men! Thou conqueror in the field! But the field shall see thee no more; nor the dark wood be lightened with the splendor of thy steel. Thou hast left no son. But the song shall preserve thy name. Future times shall hear of thee; they shall hear of the fallen Morar."
Pros: AFFORDABLE, strong ethnic food centers. Do you want mountains? Yes. Do you want beach? Yes. The working class is diverse. On one freeway, you're looking at rockets, then up north, it's the film industry, and everything in between. Culture is overlooked and underappreciated (see: Getty) compared to other US metro cities.
Cons: Wild EVERYTHING-ELSE living cost structures, chronic homelessness, questionable climate change macro. And oh, wow, a special place for LA drivers.
Los Angeles strikes me as a reversal of the old adage: a great place to live, but I wouldn't want to visit there. It's not really my cup of tea (I walk everywhere), but the everything-access and relatively chill neighborhoods are way more appealing than the reputation LA gets from most outsiders.
huh, so as someone who lives just a bit south in OC and has frequently visited LA, i'm surprised people like living here who don't have millions of dollars (if you mean LA proper).
The safe areas that seem close to the jobs in LA are extremely expensive from what I can tell. Unless you're looking at a 50 minute commute, you don't have too many options, no? Jobs are in downtown or the West Side, and good neighborhoods near there are what, SM, and Beverly Hills?
There are great things about LA (as I said, I like to visit): music scene, comedy, nightlife, restaurants, etc. I love that I can get a drink at a super high end bar with celebrities and then go eat a cheap dog on the street after a show.
Museums are great as well, the Getty is one of the best places to visit in the world. But living there? Not unless I had 5M to plop down for a place in BH...
Not much has changed in the current live poker meta. Yes, the average player may be better, but if you put in the consistent time to study/solvers/hand reviews, IMHO that puts you in the top 20 percentile. It's getting to the top 5-10 percentile that is killer.
Ultimately, like life, the only true edge you can control is game selection. Hence, that Rounders quote that rings eternal:
"Listen, here's the thing. If you can't spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, then you ARE the sucker."
I don't have the greatest references available, but a naive Google search brings up quite a few sources from databases and surveys that say that while 30% of poker players do better than break even, only 18% of actually manage to make any kind of worthwhile income from poker and only 5% of poker players make what is considered good income from it.
I don't know what "good income" is, whether it's like 100k a year or 500k a year... but I can take a pretty good guess that unless you're in the top 15%, poker is probably not worth it professionally.
Surely there's a lot of HUD/automated play now. Where players are simply seeing the GTO play for the entire hand. Sites make an attempt to prevent this but today I'd play online with extreme scepticism.
Real-time assistance simply wasn't a thing back in the day.
Many competitive games/sports where you are trading ELO or rankings (chess, RTS, boxing) are like this, but I wouldn't judge it outright as "not productive."
I'd reckon it's more about the journey, the stories and friends we made along the way, even though there may be few.
Whenever someone asks, "Why do they do that?" I always share the man who holds the Guinness World Records for rolling an orange with their nose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66xwQZuic3E
I find it hard to understand how you could argue it's productive when it is literally about exploiting other people's inexperience, naivety or honesty (lacking a "poker face") in order to take their money from them. It doesn't produce anything. At best you could argue it's a form of entertainment but it's not even good at that except as an observer sport.
Gambling, for most people, is ultimately a form of fraud. It's built on the narrative that you can get rich quick. Gambling is for the winners. The losers are just paying for it. The narrative hinges entirely on numbing the mark's rationality and making them not think about the odds, getting them to keep throwing money at you until they go bankrupt.
Rolling an orange on the other hand is something you can do entirely by yourself without harming anyone except the people you inconvenience if you do it somewhere public. Neither activity is productive but at least rolling an orange with your nose isn't actively anti-social unless you're a dick about it.
"There's safety in thinking in a diner. You can have your coffee or your milk shake, and you can go off into strange dark areas, and always come back to the safety of the diner. "
"The light can make all the difference in a film, even in a character. I love seeing people come out of darkness."
What an interesting man. RIP.
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